Mitt Still Hasn’t Convinced

On his nationally syndicated radio show on Wednesday, April 25, Republican talk show host Michael Medved gloated over the fact that Mitt Romney won a wave of primaries with no effort, hands down, with no competition. But has Romney convinced his base? Are voters enthusiastic for him? The facts don’t convince.

When you look at the delegate count and the number of primaries he’s won, it almost does seem that Romney is GOP voter’s favorite. But looking closer at the margins of his wins tells a different story. So, establishment flacks like Medved are indulging bombast instead of serious commentary.

Granted Medved allows his desire to be right in his advocacy overwhelm his common sense and he has always been a sellout to the GOP establishment, but while he is right that Romney has been the winner he’s only been a nominal favorite, not one that has run away with the field.

Last week, Delaware and Pennsylvania, for instance, were indicative of this lack of enthusiasm Romney is suffering because in neither primary did Romney win 60 percent of the vote.

This is significant because, as Eric Ostermeier notes, no presumptive nominee has ever gotten under 60% in these two primaries this late in the game.

A Smart Politics review of Republican primary election data since 1972 finds that Mitt Romney’s performances in Delaware and Pennsylvania mark the first time a GOP frontrunner has failed to reach the 60 percent mark in a contest conducted after his last major challenger dropped out of the race.

Couple this with the startling inroads that first Newt Gingrich and then — more successfully — Rick Santorum made into Romney’s primary campaigns and you see a probable nominee that, while he won more than the others on strict wins and loses, he only did so by spare margins in many cases.

What this shows is that the GOP base has still not warmed to Mitt Romney as their nominee. He’s become the default candidate, the “one that can win,” as opposed to the one everyone is excited about.

This won’t necessarily doom Romney’s candidacy, of course. What he needs to do from this point is truly drive home how disastrous Obama has been for this country. If this election becomes a vote on how wonderful Mitt Romney is, he’ll easily lose. It has to be about Obama.

To win, Romney absolutely must make this election a referendum on Obama’s failures. Clearly Romney’s own voters are not excited about him — at this point it doesn’t seem that they ever will be — but what they find increasingly foreboding is the idea of allowing Obama a second term.

So, what we must understand is that most Republicans and conservatives will not be enthusiastic to vote for Mitt Romney. They will, though, be enthusiastic to vote against Barack Obama. Romney has to run his campaign on the basis.

Warner Todd Huston

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago-based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com, BigJournalsim.com and all Breitbart News' other sites, RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, and many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs across the country to discuss his opinion editorials and current events as well as appearing on TV networks such as CNN, Fox News, Fox Business Network, and various Chicago-based news programs.
He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the book "Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture" which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com.
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